epithets in -head

From time to time I get to thinking about all the different kinds of -head it is possible to call people. Here is a list, into which I have also integrated several kinds of -brain (because I feel these are pretty similar):

• air-
  
• bird (-brain)
  
• block-
  
• bone-
  
• chowder-
  
• chuckle-
  
• dunder-
  
• egg-
  
• fat-
  
• feather (-brain)
  
• hot-
  
• jar-
  
• knuckle-
  
• laser (-brain) (thanks, George)
  
• lunk-
  
• meat-
  
• noodle-
  
• pin-
  
• shit-
  
• thick-

(jarhead is a US Marine; all the rest are general-use epithets, aren't they?) This is by no means an exhaustive list; please feel free to contribute in the comments. A couple of things I think are vaguely interesting: wouldn't you think meathead and bonehead should mean different things? And yet they have (by me) similar senses of density. But besides meat and bone and fat, what is there? And the opposite of dense is light, and yet airhead is no more complimentary than the others. Finally, egghead is not precisely complimentary, but it makes an insult out of intelligence rather than out of stupidity.

Discuss.

first fandom

So I had a productive day culminating in buying a dress for my friend's wedding which I would not normally even have considered, but ellen_fremedon and I together channeled our inner sanj (mostly, she did it) and it's being slightly altered in the shoulders and that task is done. And then on the way home, we were talking about Star Wars and how when the whole pet theory in Episode I fandom was that If Only Qui-Gon Jinn Had Lived To Train Anakin, Anakin Wouldn't Have Turned, what I did was take the fix-it setup mrshamill and I had begun and run like hell with it, where basically Qui-Gon survives and Anakin turns anyway, because that's how I roll.

"Granted, I had him turn for the right reasons," I said.

"What are the right reasons?" said Ellen.

"To save his wife and unborn child," I said - and I was off, explaining the mid- to high-action of my epic Star Wars saaagaaa, and getting wildly excited to be telling Ellen this story that she's never read before (despite being my friend for lo these many years, so who says there's nothing new under the sun?), and even with a forty-five second digression on whether Tatooine is the planet furthest from the bright center of the universe or farthest from it*, you guys, it has been ages - ages! - since I have been so giddy about anything fannish at all. It was marvelous. I felt like a kid again. Ellen was a little disappointed that I am not (yet!) that giddy about the Vorkosigan saga, but I did explain that I'm not even finished reading that thing yet and I'll likely be quite excited about it once I've read it all and probably read it again or at least marinated in it for a while - but there's nothing to be done about the fact that exactly one fandom reached me in the critical period, and Star Wars was it. (Blah blah extend the metaphor Star Wars native language etc. etc.) SERIOUSLY. I'm going to have to go over to the AO3 and read me some of my own Star Wars stuff before I go to bed tonight, is how nostalgic and wired I am about this fandom, even though the very best of my Star Wars stuff is not by my present standards really all that good.

[twirl]



* My mother always said - probably prescriptively, but it stuck - that farther was a comparison of distance, while further could be a comparison of distance or of degree. I believe Luke says "If there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from", but I suspect further would have been neater because I'm pretty sure Tatooine is far away in every measurable respect.



[e saturday morning ta: See, but then I was up until 3:30 finishing A Civil Campaign. I may not be like a hyperactive teenager about the Vorkosigans, but let's not doubt that I'm invested in their well-being. :-) (Having gone to sleep at 3:30, no, I do not know why I am awake at 7:45. It wasn't my choice. I imagine there is a nap in my future.)]